Arya Jeipea Karijo on queer digital utopias

by by the Whose Knowledge?

Welcome to the Femininja Podcast. This series was co-curated and co-hosted with our friends at Whose Knowledge?. These episodes were recorded during the Decolonizing the Internet, East Africa gathering in Lusaka, Zambia.

Kerubo Onsoti: Welcome to yet another episode of Decolonizing the Internet. My name is Kerubo Onsoti from the African Women's Development and Communications Network, and I'm here with…

Youlendree Appasamy: You're here with Youlendree Appasamy and I am the Communications Associate for the Visible Wiki Women campaign at Whose Knowledge? and we also have our lovely guest.

Arya Jeipea Karijo: Yeah, my name is Arya Jeipea Karijo, and yes, I'm an ideal guest.

Kerubo Onsoti: Yeah. So tell us more about yourself. Tell us where you come from, your country, your organization, your passions, what you do on a day-to-day basis.

Arya Jeipea Karijo: Well, that's a lot. So let's see about myself. I like using, so if you've been on my social, there is what I use as a standard introduction because that whole question of “tell me about yourself” has always been difficult. And so I found, so for me, the way I do it is I introduce myself using absolutes.

Kerubo Onsoti: And that's fine. Go for it.

Arya Jeipea Karijo: And so yeah, the main absolute is that I'm a human being. So that's me. Sometimes I might break down that humanity of mine. And so for example, I exist as a transgender woman. It's part of my humanity. I love as a lesbian, that's also part of my humanity and the way my viewpoint of the world and the way I tend to see the world is through an African feminist lens. So I fight as a feminist and I like using that as my introduction.

Kerubo Onsoti: And now we have that introduction recorded, so you can just play it for other people. When they ask you this question going into this podcast. And are there any affiliations or organizations you want to give a shout-out to in terms of the work that you do and who you feel connected to in a more professional workspace?

Arya Jeipea Karijo: Well, shout-outs, well, I mean if it's connections, we'll give it to Whose Knowledge?. There’s a lot of connection there from the work this last year, but also a lot of Kenyan, especially LBQ and transgender activist groups, community groups, because the fact that I get to be on podcasts and in media is just because of the work they do, not so recognition to all of those.

Kerubo Onsoti: So Arya, tell us in your day-to-day job, the one that pays the bills, how does the internet factor into the work that you do? And maybe a second part to that question is generally, then how does decolonizing not only the internet, but the different spaces and social realities that you exist in come into your day-to-day?

Arya Jeipea Karijo: Interesting. Maybe I'll start with decolonizing, and I think it's something I was talking about over lunch that there's an opportunity for everyone to decolonize. So not just for us as former colonies of some European nation or not for just people who are descendants of people who were enslaved and not just for which other group, indigenous folks who lived on ancestral lands, which were taken away from them. So decolonization is not just for us, it's also for the descendants of colonizers because their ancestors had their minds colonized to see the world in a certain way, to believe that certain groups of people are lesser than they were, to believe their religion was saving other nations of the world from, I don’t know, bringing them into the light, literally when they are down of connecting with the divine and with the universe. So just believing that your way to connect with all of this was superior and their descendants need to walk away from that. And so for me, decolonization is not just reserved for groups, it's something all of us can do. It's for men to decolonize from the fact that they believe that they’re the gender that's better than the other genders - that’s also a colonial mindset.

So decolonization is for all of us. And for the groups that I work with on a day-to-day, especially queer folks, it's important because if you look at a lot of African traditions and Asian traditions, queerness was part of it. So from one of my people's of origins, people who did not fit into the gender binary were taking us, the medicine people of that community. And I remember in grade school we’re taught about the medicine men. And then when I came into activism, I actually found they weren't really medicine men, the men who occupied a space that was both feminine and masculine, feminine in terms of how they wore their headdress and feminine in terms of what they were to the community. Because we come from a community that was traditionally warriors, which was fighting men. And they found for the balance of this community, they needed to have someone occupy that powerful feminine figure.

And so they chose this non-binary person who could either get married to women or men, and they call this person a Mugwe. And this person literally used to tie their left hand until when they had to bless the community and they'll wrap their hand and bless the community and then wrap it again. And that was symbolic, of the femininity of the community. And there's all these stories and cultures. There's one, this one, this one is from the Kikuyu tribe, and this young person told me that their grandmother saw them and they're struggling with their gender to find their place in this world, in the gender they occupied. And their grandmother was like, oh, in our times we would just send you to walk around the tree like the mugumo tree. And when you walked back, you are exactly the person you feel that you are and that's how we'll treat you. And so, the fact that we have all these things that were not either documented or not, unless you find good grandmothers who can remember because a lot of them will just tell you, “Oh we found Christianity, we left all those things behind.” But there's all these gems of queer traditions. There was bunch of tribes in Kenya, the Kikuyu, the Kamba, the Kipsigis, the Mandé, some of which have some of my origins who had women marrying each other.

And some of this is lost. A few of it is found in ethnographies by a few white men who documented that even if the documentation was skewed and they would say, “I didn't want to speak to those women”, but they were actually married and they wrote it down. So I think decolonizing means for me and for these communities, we kind of are activists. For me, decolonizing would mean finding these small pieces of heritage and using them to define what our future looks like. So a lot of our cultures have been erased, but it's possible to pick bits and pieces. So it's possible to say, “Oh you know, this Meru tribe had non-binary medicine men” or “the Kikuyu women used to get married, and the Kamba people had three genders.” So it's okay in shaping our Kenyan and African futures to pick bits and pieces of this heritage and say, “the state I want to live in or the country or the region of the world I want to live in should have these bits and pieces of things that were found in my people's way of being before colonization. So that's what decolonizing means for me, and I think that's what should mean for queer Africa. The fact that we're all stuck with laws that criminalize us and laws that we picked directly from the empire, especially the British empire, then one way to become free, one way to make queer Africa free is to lose that last bit of being colonized, to literally decolonize.

Youlendree Appasamy: So as you're talking, I was thinking about how those sense of freedoms as well as queer archiving of ancestries of stories, how would you say that translates or doesn't translate itself in online spaces?

Arya Jeipea Karijo: So yeah, the first place I ever found anyone talking about queerness and Africanness in one discussion was I found it on Instagram and this young person, the name is Matthew Blaise, and they had it on their timeline and I think it was part of either their Master's Degree or their Doctorate, I'm not sure what it is, but then they had collections from Angola, from Zimbabwe, from Kenya about all these queer African cultures. And that for me was, it was like really eye-opening. I was like, wait, because for a long time I'd always been made to feel un-African, because I look a certain way. And so the assumption is I've always tried to figure it out, but if your life doesn't look like the box, then you're kind of regarded as someone who does not belong and always will get that question, “Oh, where are you from?” Because the assumption is I can't be Kenyan. But yeah, so when I found this article, well series of posts, and I was like, wait, there's actually validity to me being African and being Kenyan. Actually more validated than the people who always keep asking, “are you Kenyan?”

Yeah. And so that kind of sent me to this whole research or exploration phase. And I think, so, it was always either on Instagram, there's always Madiblace or Alok Menon always keeps posting all of these books. So I went off on a thing to find my own. But I mean talking about archiving and documenting, I think they've both done a really good job. So Alok reads books and then does an Instagram book review. So it's small slides to break down the book. And I think it's important to have it because it's important to have it in a place. Yeah, because like I mentioned, Kikuyu women marrying each other and there's an ethnographer who documented that was Leaky, I think the older Leaky, Dr. Leaky, and he only used two pages to talk about these women who married each other - in modern day terms we’d call them lesbians, or saphics. But he wrote only two pages about them in an ethnographic study, which was I think almost a thousand pages. It was like really long. And he felt that it'll be lower than his standards to have a conversation with these women and so he actually spoke to the men around them and asked them “what's their relationship?” Of course the men minimized it and were like, “oh, they're married for inheritance.” So they kind of dismissed it. But he wrote two pages to his credit and he always admits, “I didn't talk to them. It didn't feel right or important” but it's better than the others because he put two pages somewhere. One other colonizer I know is Lugard, and Lugard wrote back home and said, “I've seen women in relationships with each other, but I believe one is the slave master and the other one is the slave.I can't see how two women can be together.” So the thing is, if queer folks living in the 21st century do not pick these tiny pieces of recording, because there is nothing else left, like literally if I go to an older person in the community, they don't remember their lives, pre-Christianity, pre-colonization, and this we’re talking older, like 90 years old, 100, they might remember a few pieces of things, but they're also going into the story by telling you about we became Christian, so why are you asking about those old things. And so it's important for us to capture these bits and pieces of stories that are still out there and then have them somewhere in a repository. I dunno, we keep video or something, but they need to be somewhere and they need to be preserved just because if we're going to create some future, or future ways of being, then we need to have, is it a reference point, something we can pick something we don't need to create from.

We can create from my imaginings of what a humane society, a just society will be. But it's always easy to do that if you have some reference back, something to not anchor, but almost validate. I'm not sure what that will be, but it's nice to have these sources you can go back to and say, there used to be something, and I'm not just building from the blue, I'm reframing from a basis. Well I'm sure those African cultures that may have been bad to queer folx, but yeah, we don't have to pick the bad things when we have a choice of picking the really basic things and making them into some beautiful future. So that's the role I will see for repositories and putting knowledge in some place. Then if someone else is ever going to go looking, they won't have the same challenges I had looking for bits and pieces of information in an ethnography in a few paragraphs in someone else's work. And it's like such disparate pieces of information and then I feel like they're all sitting with me as separate pieces from elsewhere. So the idea will be like to move all of this and put it somewhere where someone else can just go and find, okay, these are the sources and this is all the ammunition you need to go create this future you're looking for.

Kerubo Onsoti: I think the Wikipedia queer user group would love that information. I love that archiving up there, and I totally hear you with understanding queer pasts as queer futures because there is a line of continuity and colonialism was a huge and violent rupture, but who's not to say that we have queer ancestors? And even with my history of indentureship in South Africa, queer people were not recognized or written about. And I'm in a collective of queer Indian South Africans and we are wondering where are our ancestors, and so you read and look at the archives and you imagine these platonic intimacies maybe as something else, right, as maybe male-male intimacy or women in relationships with other women. So I hear you on the, you're finding it and you're the node, and maybe that's where internet and online spaces can be that potential of bringing all those pieces together and keeping them together for young queer Africans to find that. And instead of going through the kind of hard work and the struggles maybe we've gone through and older queer Africans have gone through to figure out and piece together our histories in that way. So I want to take us from that space into thinking about how the past few days have been in terms of what you're interested in your day-to-day, what the work you do in your day-to-day and how the DTI East Africa conference convening has fed into your thoughts and your thinking about your work.

Arya Jeipea Karijo: I think I started a bit of why it has fed into my thoughts like the online space we can curate it to be with all our aspirations, the things we want to see in the world, we can actually get an online reflection of that and then do the reverse instead of saying the online is influenced by the physical, we can now ask the physical to be influenced by the online. So if people say, oh, we don't have women leaders, and you can be like, oh, but in the online space there's women leading these forums or creating these forums. So are you afraid of having them lead in a particular sector in government or a particular space and things like that.

Yeah, but that's my imagination. But that was sparked by some of the conversations we had today. The other thing, I think it's nice post-pandemic just to meet human beings. Well, I mean covid is not over, but for literally two years of pandemic-induced non-mobility and lockdown and all those kinds of things. And I think this has been my second large meeting. So it's really beautiful just meeting other feminists from different movements, not necessarily the queer movement. And then just seeing that our beliefs about what the world should be and the world is being online, the world being the planet that we occupy in terms of climate change and all those kind of things. Because being in a family space it doesn't get narrowed down to one topic. It literally covers all the topics around our existence, covers about being human. Last week was from one other meeting and this felt like a breath of fresh air. t The conversations and people, and it didn't feel like work. I know there's a lot of work going on. I think there shouldn’t be separation between work and being, but in the event that there is a separation, this will fall into being more than into work. And again, because work has taken on this whole drudgery capitalistic kind of setup. But yeah, if I was to put this, it willnot go into that drudgery, capitalistic setup actually it will go into these parts of being and existing and living. So I think this is what the convening these two days has been, just meeting people I like and meeting people I met during the pandemic and I was hoping to ever meet them at some point. And now we all met here, so that was really nice.

Kerubo Onsoti: So we have talked a lot about decolonizing the internet and how important the internet is to the work that we do. What would you like to tell the listeners - we'll have audiences listening to this podcast- what is your message to them with regards to decolonization and even the queer community and how it all ties into it?

Arya Jeipea Karijo: I don't have so much to tell people, but I think the main would be I think it's my outlook on all of this. It's like we need to humanize things. I feel all these conversations are about humanizing spaces, so humanizing the online space, humanizing our physical space. And Yeah, I think I'll just stay with humanize. I mean, I also want to share a bit of fears that I have about trends. It's a trend I've noticed on Twitter. Twitter used to be this space where you could engage with anyone. So someone will be a PhD and they're running a thread about their research. And anyone, literally anyone could just get on them and be like, oh, I'm learning this. Or ask questions. And you could challenge politicians based on their policy and it'll just be in a place for conversation. I think a lot of the social media used to be that. I think Facebook also, I mean the corporate owned social media. So a lot of them were these for people like any, and I know there was a joke in Kenya, Nairobiand people that I'm tweeting from Kinoo, which Kinoo is like, well considered one of those places to live settlements.

So it was always that kind of a joke that, yeah, I'm engaging you as a politician but could be living here, I could be living in Kibera, Kinoo, Mukuru, but because we're on Twitter together, I can go ahead on with you and have a conversation. And that's the beauty of it, that all freedom. But then over time, especially this year that Kenya has been going through an election period, I've noticed a lot of the conversations are not conversations anymore. It's people either being bigoted or just hurling insults, and especially young Kenyan people have picked up, it's like an hashtag and they say literally it'll be said as violence, but to avoid being flagged, they put it as violence. So V-A-W-L-E-N-C-E, and they just troll people and reply, literally throw insults and then hashtag it as violence and also the continuous trolling of women. So literally just post, someone will post a picture and say, I'm doing something today I’m eating out, playing golf, and people sexualize it or do whatever. And so it's such a trend that the freedom this space is offered is also open to abuse and open to be used as an abusive space to other people. And that whole thinking, with my dream of the online space being the place that we curate such that now the physical can learn from it. I think for that to happen, then there has to be some level of not really censorship. It'll be nice for everyone to keep having this ability to just speak up, but it'll also be nice if the online spaces offered them a point of learning. I feel a lot of these people, they don't have the material to engage in something to bite in so that they can talk about. So if you can't engage constructively on a topic, you just choose one liners, send memes that are insulting towards people. So you can't keep up a sustained engagement or conversation. So the easy out for you is to just hurl an insult, sexualize someone. I mean, we've had a very interesting discussion. I'm talking about these three and things that used to be there and things that were in ethnographies. You can't have this kind of a discussion with, for lack of a better word, you are regular day-to-day Kenya. Because for them it's like, why is that important for me? I just need somewhere to hustle. Literally to hustle and pray. But yeah, we've almost come down to that and it is getting harder and harder to convince people of a more humane, a more human-centered world is the way to go. Because still People believe in powering through situations like powering through, meaning extracting from the world, powering through, meaning extracting from other people. And this whole idea of more humanness and caring for people like mental wellbeing, human rights for them, this seem like unnecessary things like a burden onto the important things in life. Which for them is kind of making it - making it, meaning having the amount of financial wellbeing. This life that everyone has always called the American Dream, but literally it's now the Kenyan Dream. It's the dream for whichever other country that has been colonized or something, it's a new colonization of the mind. And so for them, it's all these other discussions of being a better human race seem to be an inconvenience and they shoot it down with an insult or a trolling meme, then they'll target violence.

And so yeah, I think for me, this is if the school system is not giving this well, and a lot of, I'm stereotyping when I say young, but it always feels like it's a lot of the younger folks in these spaces, but the school system are not giving them the material they need for having conversations about what the world should look like. And so my thinking is, is it possible for not just online space to be the space where we shape this future world or even as part of building this future idealistic world online first, is there a place where we curate or create a repository for truth? I feel that's becoming a less and less available commodity. Commodifying truth, but yeah I think truth should be out there in some format and in a better format than the fine print that is in the user agreements of things.

It should be better than that and it should be so pervasive that people can only avoid it when they intentionally do not want to see it. We can have a lot of freedom online and freedom of existence, freedom of discussion, but if there's no material for discussion, then I think we'll just give freedom to a new kind of bigotry and chaos and people dismissing valid arguments with one liners. One liners, like “this is not how God intended it”, or one liners in Kenya there’s a popular one, and it says, “the law is very clear.” The person quoting this will know almost zero about the law, but they're just going to reply to you with the one liner saying, “the law is very clear.” But these are random thoughts and thoughts I have been having sitting in this space with other feminists and talking about things.

Kerubo Onsoti: No, I agree with you actually, because you obviously have to think about your safety and because coming, I think Africa is a very conservative continent and sometimes I feel like people just refuse to embrace knowledge and information. And so even as we think of the marginalized communities, as we think of more inclusion and communication and how we will be represented in all our diversities, I think we should also talk about creating a space where women feel safe because we've had so many women leave the internet because of how women are portrayed. And I think it's also a discussion we need to really constantly have. Because even the way you're told, “oh, you shouldn't be with the babies online as this perfect woman, you shouldn't be vocal or stuff on the internet.” I don't think white women get that probably because white men don't reason like that.

But besides the point, I feel like there's so much information and so much decolonization of the mind that needs to happen, especially can I say African men. Of course, because African, because they're the danger to us. They're the reason why we are so scared of the internet. They're the reason why and all this stems from that socialization, how they've been brought up. And it's a very colonized mind. And so if we can be able to educate, it's hard. But if we can be able to educate them and give them all this information, then they can also help us create this safe space for the women of color. Because to be honest, we are the most affected. So hopefully even as we continue with DTI, as we continue with these discussions and we will be able to touch on those topics and just mobilize women and even men to be able to talk about why we want to decolonize the internet and why we want to make it safe for all the women, all the women of color and all our diversities.

Youlendree Appasamy: And all the queer people, the non-binary people, the gender queer people. I do have a question about that, about the burden of teaching. Right, and if, not if, as we are living through the world experiencing it as we do, I kind of wonder where the responsibility of education of the truth of that ends up landing. It ends up landing on feminists. It ends up landing on people who have experienced much of the hardships of living, not on governments, not on men, to be teaching and telling each other. And for us it's through our lived experiences, but they don't have those lived experiences to feel that necessity of “we need to do better.”

Kerubo Onsoti: No, I agree. I don't remember her name and we were trying to let her know, you see points of education, but then sometimes you're dealing with someone who just doesn't want, they just don't want to listen to what you're saying because to them they already have this belief, their mind is set that you're not supposed to exist in this world. You are inferior, or you get what I mean. And I feel like when I say point of education, the burden doesn't have to be on us because even as you not argue, but as you go back and forth with someone, you can be able to tell if this is a person who is asking because they're curious and they want to learn, or this is someone who just wants to annoy you. I feel like by now you, we've been online for so long, I feel like by now, you can tell, can really tell, and you can always choose to move away from such a space. But if you're using your platform to educate and inform, I feel like you can continue doing that because you'll always reach someone who wants to learn. You can always choose not to engage with someone who just wants to annoy you, but I don't feel like that burden should be on us. They have access to materials, they have access to the internet, they have access to all this information, but they're just choosing not to, and they're choosing to annoy you. That's how I feel.

Arya Jeipea Karijo: I guess I would agree with you. I mean, when I was sort of coming into being, and a huge part of that was trying to understand myself because literally other people have this stereotype that being queer is taught, like “who taught you to be queer.” But literally what is taught in our systems is being heteronormative, being straight, being straight is what he's taught from grade two. You already have pictures of what a “normal” couple should look like, what a girl and a boy should be. And that's all you know. So for a queer person in my generation, which was kind of pre-internet, it was really hard to find information about me, about being where I was. And when I found all of this, and for a long time after I thought what was lacking in the world was knowledge. These people don't really, it's just that they don't know. And so I would spend all my time online trying to educate people,

Kerubo Onsoti: Inform. And you get tired.

Arya Jeipea Karijo: You get long articles. I love the longest pieces when someone asked a question on Twitter, I’d be the one answering,

Youlendree Appasamy: And you spend time and effort and you find your resources and references and then you just get some hateful comments or no response.

Arya Jeipea Karijo: I was literally the person who would tweet with reference to academic papers. So after all the queerest queer African history I’d be like, “oh, if you really want to go read more about this, here's a paper and here's this, here's this.” And it took me a while to figure out some people just obtuse and they don't want, they're not looking for references. And I guess the one instance I had of that was again, I got into this discussion with a Ugandan televangelist. And so we had a whole thread of an exchange and I was telling him about queer African cultures and he even asked my tribe and told him, I'm from different tribes of origin, but these are the ones.

But all the time he was asking me about my tribe, he was trying to invalidate to say that these tribes didn't have a queer culture. So when I presented to him this and I was like, oh, this was their queer culture. And then so some random person joined into our conversation and he was like, “it's a lie”. So I was like, we've been on this thread for a while. I have my facts laid out so you can't just answer with a three letter sentence “It's a lie.” You need to come better than that. And so this guy goes, “it's okay to kill a few minorities for the wellbeing of the majority.” I was like, wait, you'd really kill us for something that I just showed you is a false belief. And so this televangelist now joins back in and he tells me, I can see you've been schooled in queer theology and there to misguide the simple-minded, like the person saying, we should be shot. And he was like, but I've learned to deal with people like you. So really we've had a conversation. You've not addressed any of the history and all the free education I'm giving on this thread, but you're just going to agree with the person who said we should all be lined up and shot, because you're suggesting there's nothing a round of AK-47s won’t do.

And the previous year, November, there was a documentary by the pope, Pope Francis, and in it he talks about how even if he can't change church rules immediately he will encourage states to make sure that queer people can have family, can be themselves. And so I asked this person, I'm like, okay, the Pope said this in his documentary, and he was like, no, the Pope is apostate. I was like, really? So every religious person who's going to say something in support of us is now ungodly. I think that was my point of beginning now to analyze every conversation I get into and be like, “okay, is this person in it? Do they really want to learn stuff or they just want to be combative?” I've had one with a UK based feminist. She's a little, and she's a tough trans exclusionary feminist. And this one was, I think the discussion was about how, same discussion, but about our colonization like race, like queerness and queer Africa. And she's like, oh, but by even calling yourself transgender, you're already using our western term. So at least it was a thread with someone else. And so I'd used a lot of terms. I'd used terms “female sons” and “male daughters”, which is an Igbo term that represents that people are fluid between genders. Literally that side translates from Igbo “female sons” and “male daughters.” Then, so she goes on and she's like, “oh, these DSA people that you're referring to “female sons”. I'm like, that's an African reference. I'm not referring, I don't know what the hell you mean by DSA. I'm assuming you mean intersex persons, but within the Igbo, this term does not refer to intersex persons. It's a term about gender, not about sex.

So by you assuming that when I use transgender person, I mean it in the same way a UK trans person sees it or a US person. You're the one in the wrong, literally, I'm talking, I'm using, I've owned this term for myself, what being transgender means to me, being an African trans woman, it doesn't mean, it doesn't mean the stereotype that the West does it, that you're becoming a quote, “a real woman” or a cisgender woman. I'm not becoming that. I'm becoming myself, which is a very different thing. And so at that point she got off the argument. But yeah, again, just this whole people just get into arguments because they're not there to learn. They just had to obtuse and to be bigoted and all that. But yes, I thought it was interesting.

Youlendree Appasamy: Well, thank you so much for schooling us on Queer African histories, on telling us more about what decolonizing generally and what decolonizing the internet specifically means for you. I have one last question. If there is anything else you'd like to tell our listeners that we haven't covered here, something really important. Here's your space. Feel free.

Arya Jeipea Karijo: I feel like we've covered everything because at this rate, we're never going anywhere. I feel like we've covered everything. Thank you for the opportunity to talk, to learn and talk.

Kerubo Onsoti: I know it's been, oh, it's been a very deep session, but thank you so much for honoring our invitation and we would really love to have more conversations with you. Unfortunately, we are pressed for time, but I'm pretty sure we can use other platforms to be able to spread the word, but we really appreciate having you here. Thank you so much, Arya.. I always

Arya Jeipea Karijo: You're welcome.

Kerubo Onsoti: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much for joining us for the Femininja Podcast. We really believe and trust that you have enjoyed our conversations and they have pricked some thinking, some kind of wanting to find out more about feminism, about patriarchy, and what is the role for each one of us in detonating patriarchy and proudly and boldly claiming ourselves as feminists. So stay tuned, keep following us and engage with us on Femnet website, www.femnet.org. Thank you.

Youlendree Appasamy: You can follow Whose Knowledge? on Twitter, at @whoseknowledge.